Centage vs. Planful vs. Prophix

Centage is suited for all types of business. This is what makes this tool so great. It requires some expertise in setting it up and depending on how complex the business is, it may take longer than expected. It's a complex system and if you are not involved in the implementtion it might be hard to learn what is does.

Incentivized

There are still times that I find myself thinking that "I would have been done with this already" in Excel. Most (possibly all) the colleagues I know in our industry haven't outgrown using Excel yet... Overall, now that I feel I (mostly) "know what I'm doing" and am thru the learning stage the system I'm seeing benefit...however also feel like I haven't 'scratched the surface' of what it's capable of. Dynamic Planning, Predict/Signals, AI ...I feel we have a huge learning curve still ahead. I've explored Signals and AI Analyst and haven't been able to get reliable results to drive me to use it more...which leads me to believe we have core implementation related issues.

Prophix is best suited if you have a very extensive budgeting process that currently relies on multiple Excel spreadsheets. It is also great if you have on-prem tools that may no longer be supported for reporting. It may not be appropriate if you require an unlimited number of mid-tier users, as it can be very expensive annually. It's definitely not a cheap tool, but the cost can at least be optimized based on users' use cases. In both organizations I've worked for that use it, cost has been mentioned.

Incentivized

• Planning personnel with all the related benefit expenses is very accurate and we are able to forecast increases as well.
• Storing separate versions of the budget allows us to finalize for the year and have access to the data while we update the default plan with any changes.
• I ilke the way you can add intelligence see the detail of calculations below th eline item.
• I like writing Planning Maestro reports to see drill downs of any item and tie them to our ERP Budget

Incentivized

• It aggregates data from different sources well, allowing me to report on a wide variety of metrics that interrelate.
• I can build detailed reports so that my monthly and weekly reporting is done more efficiently
• I like the tools that I am using to create dedicated models for forecasting and budgeting purposes

Incentivized

• Reporting - single report that can be opened by multiple users, each will see only aspect specific to them based on their security access.
• Budgeting - workflow driven budget data collection, visibility of its current status, ability to take action to ensure timely completion. Ability to snapshot budget data at a point in time. Ability to perform what-if scenarios.
• Forecasting - as above with added benefit of either reusing budget level of grain or forecasting at high level.
• Granular planning - ability to create unlimited number of subsidiary models to assist with the planning process. Non-financial data collected during budget/forecast process help with operation planning and variance analysis.

Incentivized

• Head count is a bit strange as each period is considered one Headcount for a total of 12 per year, so we have to adjust when running reports
• would love to be able to attach related expenses in payroll to a kind of employee instead of doing each individually. It's time consuming.
• Have the help more available instead of having to log into separate place

Incentivized

• Dashboarding could be more flexible and easier to use.
• Dynamic Reporting has room for flexibility with nesting, dimension names showing up instead of “All,” and overall flexibility.
• Make Analyze view in Spotlight more intuitive.
• A high-level onboarding guide to understanding the different components of Planful, data flows, and tips & tricks.

Incentivized

• Ability to filter report views for report binder without creating duplicate reports.
• More extensive documentation and examples in the ProCalc library.
• More ProCalc functions that deal with the time dimension and allow functions that can utilize the system date. So if it is day 8 of the month.
• Ability to save company color scheme for use in reporting.
• Would like to create a link between the account dimension and another dimension so I can easily report on account properties. For example, an account property could be columns in a report.
• Would like to see the ability to have a report view on a dashboard. The tables are poorly formatted, and I’d like more formatting ability.

Incentivized

Our new Comptroller understands the value of Planful, and we plan to utilize it further in the organization to enhance external reporting. Strangely enough, Planful had not previously been embraced by the former CFO, who argued that we were running two sets of books (of course, we were not). Fortunately, the before mentioned reconciliation of EBITDA to Net Income demonstrated that to the banks.

Incentivized

The system works well for us, and meets all of our needs. All of our future plans can and will be achieved within Prophix, so there is no need to pursue another product. Prophix has continuously proven to improve their product over the years, which provides an even higher level of confidence in this tool, and future developments

I've lived through the changes over the years, and I have found that most financially-minded professionals should have no problems using this system.

The tool is extremely adaptable, and it enables very quick querying to give us opportunity to gain live insights into the business. Given its adaptability, we are also able to create scenario analyses very quickly in rapidly changing environments. The formatting also enables us to provide this information in a very consumable manner.

Incentivized

I don't rate anybody a 10 because I believe there's always room for improvement, so I'll go with an 8. And I'm giving 8 because it has helped us do more than we were doing before, and I believe there's still room for improvement.

Incentivized

I only give a 9 rating rather than a 10 rating because it seems that every day around 2pm we see a slowdown in the use of Planful. I have requested our internal IT department verify that it is not an internal issue and have been assured it is the tool. We have not yet reached out to Planful to do extensive research to solve this issue.

There have been very few times that Prophix has not been available and we have been informed ahead of time. The only issue that we have is when we update cubes or import information and run processes during working hours which stops access for a short period of time but this is more about our processes than Prophix.

Incentivized

Again, the system is very reliable and, for the most part, runs very quick and smooth. When running larger queries, it does take some time, and during budgeting season our users experienced slower loading times, but nothing that raises concerns outside of normal network issues. Occasionally, as with any software we use, it will crash and you have to restart, but that does not happen very often.

Prophix has always performed consistently. We are using on-premise so many factors can contribute to slower than desired performance, most having nothing to do with Prophix itself. If we move to the web-client cloud based solution I believe performance will even be better.

Incentivized

The team makes sure that you get what you need out of the software. They will do whatever is in their power to make sure you're happy and are getting back your investment (time and money).

Sometimes we get great help when using Planful's support team and other times we don't. In particular, there is one person that often responds to our support tickets who is less than helpful, hence the reason for the 5 out of 10 rating. As a result, most of the time we reach out to our Planful consulting group as they provide faster and better support

We’ve gotten moved around a lot and so we don’t always know our pod people. Also when we book sessions with a random person it seems like we have to take the first 15-20 minutes explaining our system and process.

Incentivized

My team has attended training offered several times before/during the Planful Perform conference. This training has been extremely useful and we always learn something we didn't know prior to the training. The trainers are always very knowledgeable and more than willing to help each and every user after the training with specific questions regarding their environment. Planful also offers training and certifications on their training hub. I have completed a couple of the certifications. The courses are easy to follow along with and very informative. Additionally, Planful schedules webinars pretty regularly. They'll email their customers and allow you to register to participate live. They also record these sessions so you can refer back to them at a later date or if you are unable to attend at the time the webinar is offered, you can register anyway and get access to the recording. Their training has improved year over year!

Incentivized

Training is essential for this software to be successful for any company. We unfortunately had a bad implementation and training manager so I can say with confidence that if we had the CSM we have now - we would be light years ahead of our knowledge of the system. I highly suggest taking all training opportunities and not rushing the implementation training

Incentivized

Planful provides a lot of online training support. There's so many options for training. Admin Learning Courses, User Learning Courses. Plus they have several webinars devoted to the tool and the new features they release. New Releases can be practiced in a Sandbox Environment prior to going live in Production

Incentivized

We used our system and created a test cube to work with our own data. We ran through the different functions of Prophix and covered alot of material. We did two sessions a week, with homework tasks assigned. We were able to ask questions and cover any questions during the followup sessions.

Incentivized

After going through the initial implementation with Host Analytics and a re-implementation with Cervello (due to an ERP change, not due to a poor initial implementation), I've learned that you really must rely on your internal staff to bear most of the implementation burden. Use the vendor or partners for ideas and best-practice suggestions, and some of the easy-but-time-consuming work. Since you will ultimately be using and maintaining the application, you should be able to do most of it yourself.

Incentivized

Prophix Consulting should bring, in house, chargeable expertise in Oracle EBS table access for Drill Across and provide reasonable limits on dimension member combinations so there are no unreasonable expectations about the application of multi dimensional cubes to detail, such as revenue by product and customer.

Incentivized

I used to use an older consolidating product call FRX or something like that, very manual where accounts were adding line the reporting lines one by one.... Centage is far superior, the ability to create custom Dimension hierarchies as improved our reporting 100 fold

Incentivized

Prior to joining the company, we tried to implement Vena but were unsuccessful. There we're a few reasons it didn't work out, but a lot of it related to the implementation team they provided. In just the first week with Planful, we achieved more progress than we did in several months with Vena.

Incentivized

Prophix is so much easier to use that other platforms or products. It can be customized so much easier than other larger, more expensive products. I work for a small university where we have a small finance team and Prophix allows us to tailor reporting to emerging needs in real time without having to reconfigure clunky systems with expensive modifications

Incentivized

From our experience, Planful is only used in 2 overhead departments in our organization. We easily added another overhead department, but they decided against using Planful for their workforce and financial planning. Removing them from our environment was extremely easy.

Incentivized

Prophix is a capable tool of growing with an organization and the uses for different items in the software. Our organization was able to scale the product to lots of different end users and the needs of the departments. There are plenty of updates and features to grow and bring in new data.

Incentivized

• We were a very small company growing by acquisition so it worked well during these phases of our company growth.
• The return for our cost was tremendous especially in comparison to peers in the market.
• Analytics Maestro allowed us to grow without adding headcount by building efficient reports that can easily be mass-produced for all branches within our organization.

Incentivized

• Has allowed users to view a real-time P&L in a way they weren't able to do with Qlik.
• Budget to Actual analysis has become much more streamlined and actionable
• Long-range plan process has been significantly streamlined and a lot of time has been cut out of the process.

Incentivized

• Prophix has made it possible to move away from some Excel reporting we were doing, which allows for 50% quicker reporting on a monthly basis.
• Although it has saved us time, an improved PowerPoint feature that automatically updates our decks would save an additional 75% on top of what we already do.
• Our Board Reporting has improved by 10 hours by moving our reports fully into Prophix.